FINAL GIRL explores the slasher flicks of the '70s and '80s...and all the other horror movies I feel like talking about, too. This is life on the EDGE, so beware yon spoilers!

Nov 30, 2007

awesome movie poster friday- the LAME edition!

Ah, bad movie poster art...or should I say, movie poster art that I think is bad. We all know that not everyone in the world agrees with me on everything. We also know that those people are jerks, so whatevs.

I've mentioned some absolutely awful posters here at FG in the past, and they're just so...so... LAME that I feel the need to mention them again. Oh, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, how I sincerely fucking hated thee. We were doomed from the start, I'm afraid, because of your "one lonely man and his chainsaw" approach to the poster art. But you couldn't stop there, could you? You just had to take it three or four steps further with your next attempt at the "OMG Leatherface is an idiot man-child who loves his chainsaw" motif. For reals, is he gonna hug that saw and squeeze it and call it George? Seriously, I should be running from him in fear, not patting him on the head.

That's gotta be the least scary image of a giant, gooey zombified dude with a machete and a crispy, burned up knife-glove wielding child molester ever. It looks more like a poster for the latest Mary-Kate & Ashley Olsen "OMG one of them is a kooky free-spirit and the other is a studious, uptight nerd but they'll get into a wacky adventure and learn a bit about life...and each other! Co-starring Paul Giamatti as the stern authority figure who just doesn't get it" flick. You know, like when Mary-Kate & Ashley Olsen were nine.

Moving on, let's talk about the '90s, shall we? Or, as the decade is more popularly known, "The Era In Which The Let's Put A Bunch Of Faces Staring Vapidly On A Horror Movie Poster Because That'sSo Intriguing And Scary Method Was Born". I don't know why that moniker never caught on. At any rate, I blame the success of this poster style on the Scream franchise, in particular Scream 2- the poster, instead of focusing on the absolute creepiness of Ghostface, focused on the fresh-faced stars of today- and tomorrow!

From there, the ball just kept on a rollin'. Damn you, Scream 2...damn you to HELL!

NOTES:

1) The scariest thing about that Scream 3 poster is whatever it is they've done to the faces of Courtney Cox-Arquette and Parker Posey.

2) Holy crap, you can so smell the '90s on that Urban Legend poster. It smells like Noxema! And Taradise.

3) It pains me deeply to include Final Destination 2 and House on Haunted Hill here, because I love those movies with at least 86% of my heart. Those posters, however, blow. Death before dishonor! Or something.

4) My favorite people here are featured on the I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer...Unless I Forget poster- the broad on the extreme left and the dude on the extreme right, especially her. Are they supposed to be scared? Worst scared faces EVAR.

5) Remember Joshua Jackson?

6) Okay, The Faculty, "Take me to your teacher" is a really, really bad tagline. But it reminds me of this Garfield button I had when I was a little kid; it was a picture of Garfield with a watermelon helmet and an orange wedge in his mouth, holding banana guns. He was saying "Take me to your leader or I'll atomize your face"- I wore it all the time; I thought that shit was soooo funny.

7) Remember how much Garfield loved lasagna and weekends? It sure was a lot!

I love how URBAN LEGENDS wants to do the 6 scaredy faces thing but just can't let go of Gayheart's bust. So it's like: "6 scared people!... plus one has boobs!" the I KNOW posters are guilty as well. -lancifer

I used to work at a graphic design company that did a lot of VHS/DVD packaging and promotion and the easiest poster/box design was Big Heads Over Landscape - the star's noggins superimposed over the movie's setting.

They do the same thing for "I Know What You Did Last Summer." Both of them, actually. The shot of Jennifer Love Hewitt extends alllll the way down to show us her chest. Especially on the poster for the sequel. Everyone else is just a disembodied head, but she's gotta have boobs.

This is your best post in awhile, in my humble opinion. Sweet job cracking open the conspiracy theory of "vapid faces on horror movie posters". I must admit, I liked the I Know What You Did Last Summer one - that should have been the only vapid face poster allowed. Texas Chainsaw the beginning was one of the few horror movies in my life I have just picked up the remote, hit STOP on the DVD player about 20 mins into it, and drove it right back to the video store. And I love horror movies, even bad ones (usually).